This is about bodies.

About flesh and rawness and dirtiness, about throbbing and sensing and sexiness. And brokenness. And heart-stopping sweetness.

It’s about our bodies’ betrayals and their divinities and their astonishing service.

For me, nothing captures all of this more potently than Dorianne Laux’s poem The Shipfitter’s Wife.

I have been obsessed with this poem since I first read it several years ago—it electrifies me for the way it portrays a woman’s love for her husband, for his whole self, his entire calloused, pulsing physicality:

I didn’t grow up with men—my dad wasn’t around, no brothers—so until marriage and motherhood, men were foreign and strange to me—even outlandish.

Still now, Jon’s body is such an enigma. His crushed thumbnail with the flattened ridges—an old printing press injury. His muscular shoulders and his coarse hair that is also unexpectedly soft. Long, lean legs and the distinct narrow waist of that particularly male build of his. He has light blue eyes with comforting smile lines that I’ve memorized like a song, and yet, his body remains a compelling mystery, as in some ways does my own.

That poem is, for me, more than a reminder of the joy I feel in loving my husband. It’s also a reminder of the great and tremendous gift of his love for my body, his constant and healing physical love for the soft living flesh I spent so many years afraid of and disgusted by.

For this reason, among others, my world is the slightest bit off kilter. My left hip is a tad higher than my right; I avoid skirts with center seams or distinct patterns that accentuate this asymmetry. My left breast is also larger than my right. What to do about this? Not much. My left shoulder has a height advantage as well, so straps must be adjusted accordingly, and some necklines will slip to the right. My gait is mildly wonky, so my shoes wear unevenly. I get a pain at the site of the curvature when I sit or stand for too long.

Yoga has given me immeasurably more nuanced awareness of my body, including its balance and alignment. But the ironic part is this: being more aware of my misalignments has made me love and appreciate my body more than I ever have. I feel more tender toward and grateful for my body because of these imperfections, maybe because I’m all the more awed by what it can do. At least as much as pregnancy and the amazing healing power of childbirth and breastfeeding—transportive and transformative—yoga has brought me home to my own skin and flesh and blood.

Like everyone’s, my body’s rebellion began with puberty’s first sprinkling of pain. Then it kicked into high gear when I was 13, in the middle of my eighth-grade year, as I stood in line after gym class with all the other sweaty girls and waited my turn to bend over for the nice volunteer who was checking our backs.

“Just a minute,” said the volunteer as my head hung between my knees. “Can you come over and take a look at this one,” she called to the gym teacher. “Hmmm, I see,” said Ms. Nick. She told me to stand up and get dressed, then handed me a form to take home. I had to have a doctor’s appointment. A friend mentioned the girl down the street who had a brace. A brace? I’d read Judy Blume’s Deenie, a book about a teenaged girl with scoliosis who lived in a brace 24 hours a day.

I was sure I wouldn’t survive that.

But that’s exactly what the doctor ordered a couple of weeks later. Soon I was getting cast models made for a plastic brace that would be fitted around my torso from just under my breasts to the middle of my ass. It would fasten from behind with heavy-duty Velcro straps. It would be impossible to hide under my clothes, even the new pants my mom bought to fit over it.

I let my best friend, Kim (also my next-door neighbor) in on my terrible secret. She understood the special cruelty of our middle-school peers, and she was honest about the failure of my attempts to camouflage my thick, plastic corset as I pulled on and tore off one outfit after the next.

By the time the week was over, I was physically and emotionally wrecked.

Many months of sneaking out of my brace and battling with my parents (punctuated by my own escalating fears of disfigurement) led finally to an evaluation at a scoliosis specialty clinic. On the day of the appointment my stomach roiled and clutched. I felt embarrassed to be causing everyone so much trouble—I knew it was unreasonable not to wear the brace every day. What was wrong with me?

We rode the elevator up to one of the clinic’s top floors and waited in the lobby until we were called back to meet a handsome young doctor with a kind, easy-going smile. He had me bend over for the millionth time. He traced a finger along the curve of my spine. He pinned my X-rays up against a lighted wall. He asked me lots of questions, mostly about how long I’d been getting my periods, which made me blush, but ended up being my passport to freedom. “Well, you’re pretty much done growing, considering your menstrual history. Your spine isn’t going to change rapidly now that your growth spurts are finished. So a brace won’t do much of anything.”

“So I don’t have to wear it?”

“Which one have you been wearing? The Milwaukee?” He was referring to the kind with the metal outer rods, the kind that goes up to your neck. “No, not that one. I don’t know the name of it.”

He held out a chart showing many models of back braces, all so innocent looking on the glossy, laminated brochure. “Do you see it here?”

I pointed to the brace shoved under my bed at home.

“Hmmm. That brace would have zero affect on your curve,” he said, shaking his head. “You can go home and make a planter out of it.”

My heart soared, light as a bird. But that happy day didn’t end my struggle to accept my body. Far, far from it. More than self-loathing, what I experienced in adolescence and beyond was a kind of total disconnect, a local anesthetic that extended from my neck down.

Numb.

I felt physically dead but I didn’t even know it. Coming back to my flesh was the work of a lifetime. Filthy, painful work. Holy work. I had to remember and relive all kinds of repressed pain in my soft animal self, including childhood sexual abuse I hadn’t even begun to heal from and that would require an essay of its own to honor its gravity.

So as a teen and young adult, being numb was safest. But over time, numbness became its own torture, its own deformity.

Layer by layer, I opened to sensation…and it was terrifying. But it was also my life raft back to myself, one I gripped tenaciously when I became a mother. How could I raise whole children if I wasn’t working toward wholeness myself? Exposing those old wounds was excruciating. But, as Rumi says, the wound is where the light enters us. So I had to work to let in the light. And I had to stop working.

I had to love and be loved—thank god for that—the wonder of physical loving, a book inscribed in the flesh touch by touch, chapter after chapter, overlaying the complex network of past scars that is me—human, curved, afraid, fierce and alive.

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About
Jeannine Ouellette

Jeannine Ouellette is a writer, teacher and facilitator of Elephant Rock Retreats for Writing & Yoga. She loves coffee, autumn, Lake Superior and all of you (not necessarily in that order). She's also a senior editor and writing teacher at the University of Minnesota. Read her blog, on her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter for more musings on this “one wild and precious life.” (Oh, and she loves poet Mary Oliver.)

Comments

50978414 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F2013%2F05%2Fthis-is-about-bodies%2FThis+is+About+Bodies.2013-05-10+02%3A09%3A22Jeannine+Ouellettehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F%3Fp%3D509784 to “This is About Bodies.”

Thank you for sharing your story. My son is 13 and just came home with that same note. We are on a path of healing that has just begun. And I loved that poem, the pure love in it brought tears to my eyes. I can smell that man's body.

I'm so sorry you had to endure that brace…I suppose I may have been passed over in gym class…I remember having that scoliosis test, with no diagnosis yet all of the same symptoms as you. I have lived a normal normal life with uneven balance and yes, yoga has helped that tremendously. I am a yoga teacher, and as for any possible curvature in my spine, it has not hindered me in my life at all. I sometimes wonder if people make too big a deal out of small physical differences…I don't know anyone who measures up to a perfect skeletal model. My left breast is bigger than my right (most women's are, by the way, your heart is underneath it), and I can only wear my purse on my right shoulder (it falls off my left). Most people have uneven wear on their shoes, and if you go to a chiropractor they will tell anyone that one leg is longer than the other. It's their job to tell you this. I'm sorry you had to wear a brace and have a stigma…and happy for you to overcome it. What a beautiful story!

Loved your article! I can relate to your experience on many levels… scoliosis, bracing (ending in surgery at 15 in my case), sexual abuse, finding yoga, struggles to love my body and to being open to my body being loved…
Thank you for sharing!!!